Extant
by pedomellonaminno
Summary: For as big as the universe is, sometimes it is a small world after all.
1. Chapter 1

Rose was struck by a rather strong sense of déjà vu as she stood in a basement surrounded by moving plastic humanoids intent on killing her. She wasn't in Henrik's this time, she thought to herself as she tried to come up with a way out of her current predicament, and she actually knew more or less what was going on. But as the Autons backed her up against the wall, a hand grabbed hers, an unfamiliar voice said "Run!" and she ratcheted her evaluation of the déjà vu level to about eighty. The voice was a woman's, and not Northern, or the level might have been higher, but she decided that not getting shot was a more important thing to worry about, so she concentrated on doing what the voice said.

As they ran out of the building, Rose was sure they'd gotten out just in time, because something blew up close enough behind her that she could feel the heat from the explosion, and both she and the other brunette woman were blown forward into the snow that had apparently fallen while she'd been inside the building. She rolled over quickly, just in case it had been closer than she'd thought, and to check the condition of the woman who saved her life by opening a door she hadn't noticed. The other woman apparently had the same idea, because she was also lying on her back in the snow. The two women held out their hands to the other almost simultaneously, and used each other as leverage to get themselves up.

"Thanks for that," Rose said, nodding her head in the direction of what had been a building.

"You won't be thanking me if we get arrested for arson, so I would suggest running some more," the other woman said with a nearly-familiar smile.

"Yeah, you're probably right. I guess it's a good thing that I love the running," Rose said with a wry grin, turning and doing just that, so quickly that she missed the look on the brunette woman's face. But then they were running side-by-side again, just as sirens were heard in the distance.

Rose was just running in whatever direction took her far away by that point, so when the mystery woman darted down an alleyway, she followed her, and hoped that her unfounded trust wouldn't get her killed. There was a door set in the brick wall to the left, smaller than average and down a few steps, and it seemed to be where they were headed. Sure enough, it was opened from the inside as they neared it, and they both slipped in quickly before it was closed again.

They stood in jet blackness for a moment before a voice that sounded like a more humanized K9 asked if it should turn the lights on.

"Yes, please, Merk," came the woman's voice from somewhere next to her, and then lights that were not as bright as she'd expected flickered on.

Rose's eyes hadn't yet adjusted to the darkness, so she'd only blinked a few times before her eyes readjusted to the dim light and she could see the other woman and a robotic-looking animal of some kind that Rose didn't recognize. She didn't think it would mess up any timelines, and the woman had trusted her with what was, at the very least, a temporary shelter, so she turned to the woman with her hand outstretched.

"I'm Rose Tyler. Thanks again for getting me out of there."

"I thought the place had closed, but I didn't want to blow any of the people up, even if they are a bit short and blue, so I scanned for life signs one last time before I set it off. You're obviously alien, even without the scanner, as you're not that much shorter than me, nor blue," the other woman said, quite quickly as she shook her hand, looking at Rose curiously.

"Yeah, I'm a ways from home. I'm human, from Earth," Rose replied, watching the other woman for signs of recognition, as she looked human as well.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I've heard a lot about it, and I've been meaning to go there for ages, but haven't yet managed to get the right time. How did you get here from there?"

"By way of about eighteen other planets, plus an asteroid or six. And one very, very large space station. I've kind of lost count. It's become a bit of a blur. I've been trying to get back, but my transportation hasn't been particularly cooperative lately," Rose said with a sigh, unsure as to why she was sharing so much with this woman. Maybe it was their shared hair color- she'd stopped dyeing her hair ages ago- or maybe it was just because she need another woman to talk to like she hadn't been able to in far too long, and this particular woman seemed trustworthy.

"I know the feeling. My ride busted up on me the last time I landed her, and so I'm stranded on this planet-where I stick out like a sore thumb, even if they've been nothing but nice to me- until I can get her fixed, but it's not likely to happen any time soon. I don't suppose you know anything about fixing spaceships, do you Rose?" the woman turned to her with a tentatively hopeful smile.

"I suppose it depends on what kind of spaceship. I've spent a lot of time watching the-" she cut off for a second before continuing. "I've watched spaceships and other mechanical things be fixed considerably more often than I've fixed them myself, but I'll give it a look, if you'd like. I owe you one, anyway."

"Would you? I mean, the worst that can happen is you can't do anything, and I'm left in the same position I was before," she said eagerly.

"Actually," Rose corrected. "I could be some sort of evil shape-shifter who's taken this form to gain your trust and then abduct you and force you to eat absolutely ridiculous amounts of jelly. Don't laugh!" Rose interrupted herself as the other woman began to do just that. "I'm serious! Of course, that's not the worse that's happened to me, but it makes a pretty good example, at least when people believe me."

"All right, I believe you. That's a bit far-fetched, even to me, to make up on the spot. And I've had run-ins with shape-shifters before. You don't look familiar like they did, and it happened often enough that I installed a shape-shifter detector in Merk here, and he wouldn't have opened the door for us if you had been,"

"So who's this, then?" Rose asked, moving closer to the little robot she'd indicated.

"Rose, meet Merk, the best little droid in the universe. He's my translator, and proximity alarm, and my calculator for the particularly complex stuff, as well as my much needed company during long trips through the black," the woman said, before realizing she'd forgotten something. "Oh, and I'm Jenny, the way."

"Hello, Jenny, Merk. It's so very nice to meet you."


	2. Chapter 2

As neither of the women had any pressing problems, now that the Autons had been taken care of, they decided to have a look at the ship just then. Jenny held out her hand to the small robotic creature, and it scampered up her arm to sit on her shoulder, looking a bit more bird-like as it perched there than the six-legged creature that had been sitting on the cot. Rose looked at it curiously.

"He was built to be able to shift his shape around. I don't know by whom, but whoever did it was a genius. It's part of the reason I was able to program him to detect shape-shifters so easily," Jenny said.

"It has been my observation of Miss Jenny that she needs to run a lot, so I need a shape that allows me to stay with her," the tinny voice said. He was now more lizard-like, long and skinny, with his tail wrapped gently around Jenny's neck like a metal scarf, though Rose could still see what were probably wings folded against his back.

"He's a bit posh, isn't he?" Rose said with an uncharacteristic giggle. At the uncomprehending stares of both of her new friends, she continued. "Posh: Earth slang, formal, upper-class, elegant."

"Thank you, Miss Rose Tyler. Shall we go look at the ship now?" Merk said with a nod of his little head.

"He's also good at keeping me on track. I tend to get distracted by things," Jenny said a bit sheepishly as they walked back out the door, after having ascertained that that no police were about to arrest them.

"I had this friend, and he was exactly the same way. We would stop in and say hi to my mum and get some milk and intend to be on our way, but he'd get sidetracked by an electronic store or a sweets shop, or both, and we'd be there for an extra six hours and we'd run into aliens that we wouldn't have if we'd left when we meant to," Rose said as they walked, trying not to sound too wistful.

"And your mum lives on Earth?" Jenny asked.

"Yeah, she did. It was just me and her, and Mickey who I dated for a while but we ended up as just friends, for the longest time, but then I met this man, and our whole world got turned upside down. I got a step-dad and a mansion and some really great friends, but I lost him along the way. But now I think I can find him again, if he'll stay in one place long enough for me to find him,"

"You said 'did', as in past tense,"

"Caught that, did you?"

"Yeah. I can relate, a little at least. I don't have a mum, and my dad disappeared. It wasn't his fault, though, because he thought I was dead. But I think he's rather like the man you're looking for, never standing still, much less staying in one place long enough to be found,"

"We make quite a pair, you and I, searching for our impossible men."

"Yeah. I just hope he actually recognizes me. I changed quite a bit since he saw me last."

"I know the feeling. Mind you, my friend probably knows it better. But that's a long and complicated story, and we appear to be here."

Jenny held out her hand grandly as they entered a building that was surrounded only by grass.

"Rose, this is my lovely ship _Noble_. She was lovely, at any rate, before I crashed her. The people here were kind enough to help me get it into the garage, even if they couldn't help me fix it. So what do you think?"

Rose walked in slow circles around the squashed ship, before stopping at what was the entrance and climbing up the open ramp into the ship. The damage looked less severe from the inside, but wires and bits and bobs of machinery were scattered around. She turned and gave Jenny her diagnosis.

"Well, it certainly won't be a fast fix, but I think most of the damage is external, and that the internal systems are something that I'm a bit familiar with. I'll lend you hand, for as long as it's useful."

"Great! Thanks!" Jenny exclaimed, hugging Rose, who, after a shocked second, hugged her back with a "You're welcome." It had been a while since either of them had someone they trusted nearby, even if neither of them were sure why they trusted the other.

Jenny pulled back and gently untangled Merk from her neck, placing him on what was obviously his perch.

"So where would you like to start?"

The two women spent the next several hours working easily together, Rose picking up the specifics of Jenny's ship quite quickly. The garage was private and a little out of the way, so they weren't interrupted by any curious passers-by. Jenny had acquired quite a collection of spare parts, both on the planet and before she'd crashed, so they only left the inside of the ship to examine the outer hull. The little shape-shifting droid was a lot of help as well, identifying problems so that they knew what needed fixing.

Both were still rather hyped up on adrenaline from their last round of chasing monsters and saving planets, so they didn't stop until Merk told them that they should probably eat. Jenny had food in the garage that would have been sufficient, but decided to take Rose to explore a bit. Jenny's enthusiasm for her temporary home made Rose feel like she was visiting an old friend who'd moved away and back again, and couldn't wait to introduce her new place.

Jenny happily narrated their journey of a couple blocks to a "darling little café", and Rose's feeling of déjà vu got even stronger. _There are other chattery people in the universe,_ she reminded herself, berating herself for continuing to see _him_ everywhere. The fact that Jenny's hair was precisely the same shade of "just sort of brown" that his had been was entirely coincidental. But he hadn't used words like "darling" when describing little cafés, so she returned her attention to the here-and-now, and listened to Jenny describe the first interaction she'd had with the Crespallionites, the short, blue people that were the main inhabitants of this planet.

"But fortunately when I'd gotten past that particular issue, they were used to me enough that they didn't mind that I'd found somewhere to stay. And here we are," Jenny said, gesturing to what was indeed the cutest café Rose had seen in a long while. And it wasn't the sickeningly sweet kind of cute that many cafés usually were. She could see already why Jenny liked it.

Rose declared it her favorite non-Earth eatery once they'd been served: she'd been a little surprised that they had chips on the menu, but she'd long ago decided to try as many different kinds of chips in as many places as possible, so she'd ordered them, and they were the best chips she'd had since the last time she'd been on Earth- which was far too long to go without proper chips. They had a lot of exotic-sounding teas, and she'd picked one at random, as good tea was easier to find. It smelled a lot like a smoky campfire, and tasted a bit burnt, but with milk and a bit more sugar than usual, it was drinkable, and it made them both laugh almost hysterically as Jenny drank her regular and perfectly safe Earl Grey.

They were both in very light spirits when they returned to the garage with the spaceship, and in another few hours, the engines were able to start again, though the ship was far from flight-worthy. Within a few days, they had the exterior hull air-tight again, and within a few weeks they had become very close friends- as well as getting the ship space-worthy again. They'd ended up getting quite close to some of the Crespallionites during their stay and were actually rather sad to be leaving now that they could. They had both decided, within a couple days of Rose's arrival and completely separately, that they'd continue their searches together, and had been quite thrilled that the other agreed.

Rose had explained her Vortex Manipulator- which was named after Jack's wristwatch-like device, but operated quite differently- to Jenny, and they'd tried to come up with a way to wire it into Jenny's ship, but even with Merk's help, they hadn't been able to come up with a way to do so that would be useful. So they'd decided to alternate between searching through time and though space- just as soon as Rose managed to get her Manipulator to take two people safely.

Rose, Jenny, and Merk visited their favorite café one last time right before their departure, and returned finally the rest of the universe and the adventure that awaited them there.


	3. Chapter 3

They'd left the Jaggit Brocade behind nearly a month ago, and though there was little else to do but talk during the time that even the highly advanced engines that the two women had installed in the _Noble_ took to get from one inhabited planet to the next, they'd both avoided talking about the man they were each looking for. Jenny talked about Messaline and the woman who'd named her (and who she'd named her ship after) on the way from Convex Fifty-Six to Angvia without revealing anything personal about her relationship with her father and the events surrounding her non-death. Rose talked about her family, both growing up and in another universe on the trip from Angvia to Kandalath, without saying that she had been to another universe.

Still, not all of their talks were full of carefully avoided subjects, and they quite happily and with a lot of giggling told their most amusing stories from their respective searches as they left the last of the planets affiliated with the Scarlet Junction after dealing with a little poaching problem. They nearly added another crater to one of the moons of Phostris when they'd had to make a particularly quick U-turn when Rose had realized belatedly that she'd been to that planet before, but couldn't remember when.

After a brief run-in with an absurdly large number of people called Clive- even the girls- on the planet Doff, Rose was working on fitting parts she'd gotten from a geography teacher, of all people, on the aforementioned planet into her Vortex Manipulator and telling Jenny and Merk about the last time she'd met somebody named Clive when the little device trilled a series of rhythmic beeps and lit up again. Rose gave a loud whoop of success that was a bit too loud for the _Noble_, but Jenny was too caught up in Rose's enthusiasm to be annoyed. As they didn't currently have any specific leads at the moment, they decided to dock the ship at the nearest spaceport with the money they had left from a supply run they'd done for a semi-stranded lunar colony after their near-disaster with Phostris.

Of course, they accidently chose a space station that was overrun with unusually intelligent, unusually large rodents, and Rose told Jenny the story of _The Princess Bride_ while they helped the proprietor deal with the problem. He offered to waive their docking fee, but they warned him that their secondary mode of transportation was not particularly reliable and might not get them back when they intended, and so he took the money and gave them a fervent problem that it would be right where they left it and as shiny a mirror whenever they came back for it.

"If we'd stayed much longer, or been even a bit more helpful, I think he would have proposed right then and there," Jenny commented with a bit of a giggle, causing Rose to snort in amusement as she fine-tuned the settings on the Vortex Manipulator.

"Well, I know where to go if I don't find the Doctor, don't I?" she asked, looking up at Jenny with a grin. The other brunette woman was going to ask more about Rose's Doctor, as she was looking for the Doctor too, and wondered how many people could run around the universe causing trouble and calling himself the Doctor, but then Rose hit the last button and they were whisked out of real space into the Time Vortex.

Jenny and Rose burst back into being into what looked like a closet in the light that radiated from Merk, full of clothing that belonged to a time period that neither were native to, but looked, to Rose, at least, distinctly Earth-like, just after the first World War.

"Figures," she muttered to herself. "I finally make it back to Earth and I'm a hundred years early."

"So we made to Earth then?" Jenny asked excitedly, her hearing as good as ever, though the far-from-comfortable trip had made her forget the question she'd had just before they'd left.

"I think so, yeah. It feels like it. But if I'm right, we'd better not go out in what we're wearing now." As it was Jenny's first experience with time travel, she was quite willing to let Rose take the lead. "How bad will you feel about borrowing a couple of these dresses?"

A while later- longer than either of them wanted- they were both dressed and properly coiffed for the 1920s, and Merk was as small as he could make himself and hidden in a handbag. They exited the room again- having already done a quick reconnaissance before changing- and took a few unnecessary turns to avoid looking like they'd come out of that room and hoping that nobody would recognize their dresses. Rose's Vortex Manipulator- now hidden by long sleeves and some carefully placed bracelets- had long ago been designed to home in on the TARDIS' very distinct radiation, so if it had taken them to a hotel in the 1920s, then that was she was going to look.

The two women walked out the back door and around to the front, a wooden sign declaring it to be the Harrogate Hotel. When they entered the lobby, the people scattered around the room were all talking quietly but very animatedly in little groups. A maid was going by with a stack of towels, and Rose stopped her.

"What's happened to put everyone in such a tizzy?"

"It's Agatha Christie, miss. The writer? She turned up on the doorstep this morning with no idea where she's been for the last week or so. And Rodger- Lady Eddison's son- was murdered, stabbed right in the back, in the middle of supper!" The voice of an older woman called a name across the room, and the young woman scampered off with a quick, "Excuse me, miss."

"Well, that sounds like something he'd be in the middle of, but if it was over a week ago, he's probably gone already. But we may as well enjoy ourselves for a bit. Maybe meet Dame Christie?"

"Excuse me?" a woman's voice asked from behind them. Rose and Jenny whirled around to see a slightly older, blonde woman looking at them oddly.

"Ms. Christie!" Rose exclaimed, employing a tactic she'd seen used quite frequently: babble at them until they forgot what you'd said that had concerned them. "What a privilege! Imagine that, Jenny! Mother will never believe that we stayed at the same hotel as Agatha Christie!"

Jenny caught on quickly, and began adding her own exclamations to Rose's, both trying to sound as innocent as possible by sounding as naïve as possible.

"She may not remember where she's been," Jenny said later, after they'd made their excuses and left a very confused but no longer suspicious (as far as they could tell) writer in their wake. "But she's not slow."

"Nope. Maybe talking about her knighthood that hasn't happened yet wasn't a particularly good idea," Rose said when they'd walked out onto to the lawn away from the rest of the guests. "Did I tell you about the time I was knighted, and then banished- by the same queen, in the space of about five minutes?"


End file.
